‘The more unashamedly we talk about radical life extension, the better’

Aubrey de Grey and James Strole look ahead to RAADfest 2025, discussing longevity rights, scientific synergy and rallying public support.

RAADfest is the world’s largest and most immersive gathering dedicated to super longevity and radical life extension. Celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, RAADfest 2025 will take place from 10th to 13th July at the Red Rock Casino Resort and Spa in Las Vegas. More than just a conference, RAADfest is a dynamic fusion of cutting-edge scientific breakthroughs, clinical innovations and community-driven celebration – all designed to empower individuals to take control of their healthspan and lifespan. With its unique emphasis on accessibility, inspiration and integrity, RAADfest continues to set the global benchmark for longevity events.

Longevity.Technology: This year’s event promises a bold new chapter – one that brings together the emotional momentum of grassroots activism with the scientific firepower of the Longevity Escape Velocity Foundation. From on-site therapeutic experiences at the new RAD Clinic to a renewed focus on aging as a disease and the launch of major public initiatives, including a planned longevity rights rally in Washington DC, RAADfest 2025 is not just about extending life – it’s about accelerating a movement.

We sat down with two visionary leaders in the field of life extension – James Strole, Executive Director of the Coalition for Radical Life Extension, and Dr Aubrey de Grey, CSO and President of the Longevity Escape Velocity Foundation – to discuss public advocacy for super longevity, the vision for radical life extension and the future of RAADfest as a science-powered movement.

James Strole on the growth of RAADfest – and what’s next

The enormity of RAADfest has grown through these last 10 years since we started in 2016. Now we are doing an immersion with Aubrey, and we are bringing to the table the best of science and the best of inspiration together – it’s going to be ultra powerful.

We are dedicated to bringing the best science and the best inspiration and working together in that collaboration – we’re not out selling something, we’re out to just bring the best to the table without prejudice. We have a RAD clinic this year where people can come in and get the best therapies and modalities right there on the spot – a focus where people can begin to advance their health in a logical and very simple way and then continue that vitality and health in their daily lives.

RAADfest will also act as a springboard for our newest initiative, a longevity rally at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in the spring of 2026. We’re going to move for longevity rights as best choice medicine, and one of the key initiatives is to get aging identified as a disease so we can actually do deeper research and get better funding that way. We’re excited about that initiative and want to invite everybody who has any interest at all in extending life on any level to be at that rally in 2026.

Aubrey de Grey on combining for success

I’ve always worked very much at the interface between the hardcore science and the passion that drives people who are interested in just not getting sick when they get old, and have been to conferences that cover that entire spectrum from the purely academic to the purely non-scientific. And I feel that the people who make the most difference are the people who are at the intersection of the two and who emphasize both aspects. RAADfest’s scientific content has been gradually increasing over the years but the collaboration with the foundation will take that to a whole new level. I believe that this conference will probably be the single best ever hybrid between those two parts. People who are emotionally invested contribute more, and the more you know about the science, the more opportunity you have to contribute and to accelerate this crusade. This is a collaboration whose time has come.

Aubrey de Grey on the need to be radical

Radical life extension is something that an awful lot of people who worry about being politically correct run away from very fast indeed. When I first started talking about how we might go about doing more against aging than we have achieved so far – 20 odd years ago – I really came up with two new ways of thinking.

The first one was the idea of doing damage repair, which might be easier than slowing aging down. And this is now very much a mainstream way of thinking; however, the other thing I put forward at the same time in the early 2000s, which was the idea of longevity escape velocity, is something that’s still a really, really hard sell in the academic community. And that’s crazy because actually it’s much less speculative. It’s pretty hard to come up with confident predictions for how soon we’re going to get, you know, let’s say 20 years of life extension via damage repair, because you’ve got so many uncertainties in the technologies that have to be developed.

But all that I say in regard to longevity escape velocity is that once we do get those 20 years, however long that may take, the hard part is done. Staying one step ahead of the problem thereafter is basically certain – it’s vanishingly unlikely that we won’t. And that is really hard to challenge, but still people run away incredibly fast. And so I think that the more unashamedly, we talk about radical life extension the better. I think we just have to embarrass people into just being rational about that fact.

There’s a huge difficulty with the word healthspan – nobody wants to extend sickspan, we all want to extend lifespan as a side effect of extending healthspan. But, unfortunately, the word has acquired this connotation that extending lifespan is a bad idea, and that all we want to do is extend healthspan within some supposed natural limit to lifespan, which is complete nonsense and also is actively counterproductive. It makes people think that aging is some kind of magical thing that is even inherently off limits to medicine. The longer we extend healthspan, the longer we will extend lifespan as an inevitable side effect.

Now I have a lot of optimism that we will be able to make radical differences in mouse lifespan within the next three or four years. The only reason it will take that long is because it takes that long to do these experiments and because we haven’t yet raised the money to do the experiments. And I think we’d have an 80 % chance of getting an entire 12 months, an entire year of life extension of mice, whereas now we can only do four months. So that’s a trebling of the effect size. That is seismic – that’s my event horizon. It’s almost impossible to see beyond that because the response from the academic community, the general public and the governments of the world will be COVID scale. And that’s probably an understatement. I want aging to be the new COVID, and I want that to happen as soon as possible. And I believe that all it takes is big progress in mice, because that will be enough to get the subject matter experts in the world to start being much more aggressive in their own predictions and willing to make actual time frame predictions the way I always have. And then everyone else is primed – it’s going to be just a cascade of dominoes after that.

James Strole with the final word

RAADfest has had an overwhelming number of applications for speakers this year and we’ll be posting our list soon. I want to just put a call out to everybody who has any inclination at all of wanting to expand their life, live their life with vitality and strength to show up to RAADfest, really have the experience and get immersed in what’s really happening here. They’ll come out transformed in a better way for sure.

RAADfest 2025 will take place from 10th to 13th July in Las Vegas; to find out more, CLICK HERE.